Last week, the Lancet published a modeling studyby Oliver Watson and others from Imperial College London, funded by, among others, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This predictive model from Imperial College suggests that COVID-19 vaccination introduced at the end of 2020 saved 14.4 to 19.8 million lives in the subsequent 12 months. A summary is provided here. The Imperial College modeling team previously massively overstated anticipated COVID-19 deaths in 2020.
Models should pass basic credibility criteria to be published, based on plausibility. Alternatively, a lack of coherence with real-world data or known biology should be stated. For reasons upon which one can only speculate, the Lancet again seems not to have actually assessed the credibility of the paper prior to publication. This matters, as others who lack an apparent basic understanding of scientific process, such as The Economist and various commentators on social media, then disseminate the model’s predictions as fact.
People can die when public health is twisted in this way.
Vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 commenced in late 2020, and significant vaccination rates were not achieved in most populations until at least a few months into 2021. In a respiratory virus outbreak the most vulnerable, most likely to die, are likely to be overrepresented in mortality in year one. However, this first year did not produce anything like the mortality claimed to have been ‘saved’ by the vaccines in 2021. Lockdowns and other nonpharmaceutical interventions don’t account for this.